Server

The TOP500 list was introduced over 20 years ago to assess supercomputer performance at a time when a major technical challenge was solving dense linear algebra problems on high-end computers. Now, most consider the list a marketing tool or an easy, if simplistic, way to impress politicians, funding agencies, and the naïve rather than having much technical value.

Applications

Nordic Games has released The Book of Unwritten Tales as a Linux title, now available for download via Steam Linux Beta. A recipient of countless awards and highly acclaimed by fans and critics alike, The Book of Unwritten Tales enables the Linux gaming community to fully immerse itself in Tux’s version of Aventásia.

On May 4, 2011, a small game developer called Wolfire Games released the Humble Indie Bundle, a collection of computer games from Wolfire and other independent developers for Mac, Windows and Linux. The five titles could be bought on a pay-what-you-want model, allowing consumers to pay as little as 1 cent for the entire package. However, the Humble Indie Bundle was conceived as a charity project, and as such all proceeds from the Bundle went to small game developers and associated charities, with each customer deciding how much of their payment they wanted to go to which organization.

There’s probably a lot of pro-corporate advocates sitting in front of a plate of crow right now feeling awfully sheepish about how they defended Blizzard like Johnny Cochran defending OJ Simpson. We all know now that Blizzard was wrong and one Linux user was able to get a dual refund out of the deal.

Desktop Environments

A few days ago I started to work on a part of KWin which made me wonder what do we mean with the word “desktop” in the context of a window manager such as KWin. Of course in the sense of a window manager one means “Virtual Desktops” when speaking of “desktop”.

KDE, as I always say, is one of the most advanced desktop environments. It’s future-ready with Plasma Active which is fully baked to run on touch-based devices. It’s fast, stable and extremely polished when compared with Windows 7 or Mac.

One advantage of KDE over its free software counterparts (without naming them) is the level of customization you can achieve with it. All these characteristics of KDE make it not only easy but also a pleasure to use your PC.

GNOME Desktop

GTK themes need to be updated to work with each new major GTK version, and because of this, some beautiful themes available for GTK 3.2 or 3.4 like Zukitwo and others, don’t work with the latest GTK 3.6 available in Ubuntu 12.10 and other Linux distributions.

There are, however, a few cool themes which work with the latest stable GNOME / GTK (3.6). Below you’ll find 8 GTK3.6 compatible themes which are available in PPAs / repositories for Ubuntu 12.10 and work with both GNOME Shell and Unity.

If you think Ubuntu 12.10 is buggy and painful to use, then you must try out the new Snowlinux 3 “White”. It is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and it simplifies a lot of stuff which Ubuntu complicates! Desktops available along with this edition are: Mate 1.4, Cinnamon 1.6 and Gnome fallback 3.6. Linux kernel is 3.5.

With each day that passes, more and more people are giving Linux a try. It’s free and it can hold its ground against both Windows and Mac, so why not? And maybe you want to give it a try, too–but you keep hearing about how difficult Linux is, how it’s a “geek-only” operating system, etc. Thankfully, there are certain versions of Linux that will help ease you into the process.

A very serious argument erupted on the Linux kernel mailing list when Andy Grover, a Red Hat SCSI target engineer, requested that Nicholas A. Bellinger, the Linux SCSI target maintainer, provide proof of non-infringment of the GPL. I can think of two reasons why this is disturbing. The Linux kernel mailing list is where most of the business of writing Linux code happens, and the seriousness of violating the GPL, which would be like stealing from Linux.

[Allow me to call them Nick and Andy] Nick is developer at Rising Tide Systems, a Red Hat competitor, and a maker of advanced SCSI storage systems. Nick’s company recently produced a groundbreaking technology involving advanced SCSI commands which will give Rising Tide Systems a lead in producing SCSI storage systems.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Back in February Mark Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu for Android as a part of Ubuntu’s multi-device plan. Ubuntu for Android is a side-by-side pairing of the Android and Ubuntu OSes on a single phone. You can dock in and transform your android phone into a fully functional Ubuntu desktop and while you plug the phone out it can be used as normal android phone. Also you will be able to use your Android apps from your desktop using the Ubuntu for Android.

The OSes are sharing their Data and also the Kernel which means that no hassle of syncing and also very efficiently working OSes. More can be found about the Ubuntu for Android at Ubuntu’s official website.

Flavours and Variants

In the first part of my review of Xubuntu I just looked at the default installation.

The thing with Xubuntu is that the base is very light but it has so much potential that I believe it can be turned into anything you want it to be. As your needs are different from my needs the ability to customise is very important.

Phones

Android

Android enthusiasts trying to reach CyanogenMod.com, the website for the popular community-maintained firmware of the same name, will find themselves staring at a blank filler site as of today. As has been detailed in a blog post up on the new CyanogenMod.org, the owner of the original domain (one Ahmet Deveci) name shut the site down after he was discovered impersonating CyanogenMod founder Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik for the purpose of cutting referral deals with other sites.

When confronted and asked to surrender the keys amicably, Deveci responded by demanding $10,000 for the domain, an amount that the team “won’t (and can’t) pay.” CyanogenMod team members were able to reclaim ownership of the project’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, but upon being locked out of the system Deveci promptly deleted the domain’s DNS records, rendering the site unreachable.

If you’ve been waiting for Ubuntu for Android, it still isn’t here yet, but you can take in a promotional video for it, available here. As Mark Shuttleworth has made clear, Canonical is moving quickly ahead with its plans to bring Ubuntu to platforms going well beyond just desktop computers. Smartphones are a key platform that Canonical is targeting with Ubuntu, and the company was very vocal about Ubuntu for Android at Mobile World Congress earlier this year. So why is a video that is essentially an ad for Ubuntu for Android appearing when you still can’t get a smartphone with it running?

Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1 was chosen as the Royal Collection’s tablet by the Royal Commonwealth Society charity, the BBC is reporting today. The organization considered going with the iPad, but instead chose Samsung’s device. It’s not clear why the Galaxy Note 10.1 was picked over the iPad, which, like it or not, essentially defined the tablet era we’re entering.

Google TV has just got a new update that makes hunting content on your smart telly faster and easier, by the simple method of talking to it.

It’s ‘Voice Search’ where you can basically say anything you want to the TV and see what results come up. You won’t know how good the gizmo’s hearing is until you’ve tried it. Say “HBO” and you might go right to a shopping channel selling deodorant, or say “Homeland” to see all the live and streaming options to watch the show. You can even say “how to tie a bow tie” and watch a YouTube video showing you how to do it. Which nicely segues into Google TV’s updated YouTube app.

The mobile video game Kingdoms at War is popular with owners of Apple Inc’s iPhone and Google Inc’s Android smartphones alike. But for the game’s maker, there is a very important difference – it earns more than double the money on iPhones and iPads than it does on Android devices.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Although Samsung’s thin, lightweight Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets have dominated the 10-inch Android tablet market for the past year-and-a-half, they’re going to be facing some serious competition from new devices from Lenovo and Google. I spent the past several weeks getting to know Lenovo’s modestly priced IdeaTab S2110, which optionally morphs into a laptop-like hybrid. How does it compare?

I went to sleep with the news of Android 4.2 hitting AOSP. When I woke up and checked my Nexus I was greeted with a notification of a system update being available. I instantly hit the install button and my Nexus 7 got the 4.2 update. The new 4.2 Jelly Bean update has the same build number as the previous i.e. JOP40C but there are certain new features in 4.2.

Hackers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the lousy stock firmware your routers shipped with.

Apart from smartphones, routers and wireless base stations are undoubtedly the most widely hacked and user-modded consumer devices. In many cases the benefits are major and concrete: a broader palette of features, better routing functions, tighter security, and the ability to configure details not normally allowed by the stock firmware (such as antenna output power).

Vagrant is an open-source (MIT) tool for building and managing virtualized development environments developed by Mitchell Hashimoto and John Bender. Vagrant manages virtual machines hosted in Oracle VirtualBox, a full x86 virtualizer that is also open source (GPLv2).

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Mozilla is now something of a venerable institution in the open source world – the first release of browser code by Netscape took place back in 1998. Even Firefox is eight years old, which seems pretty incredible.

Given that unusual longevity, it’s no wonder that the project has seen its ups and down. I wrote about a particularly dark period a couple of years ago, when people thought that Firefox and Mozilla had peaked in terms of their influence. Six months later, I was reporting on the plans of Mozilla’s new CEO; there was clearly a lot starting to happen, but how would it pan out?

Earlier this year, Adobe announced its plans to abandon the widely used Flash plugin in Linux and other UNIX-like (excluding Apple’s Mac) operating systems. It meant that there won’t be a new version of Adobe Flash for these systems. Adobe, however, will continue to provide security updates to Flash on these systems for a period of five years. After that, Linux users will be forced to use the out-of-date Flash plugin indefinitely or switch to some alternatives like Gnash, which currently do not work well.

While Firefox OS isn’t here yet, it is coming soon— sometime in early 2013. If you are interested in the OS and want to give a test drive, you previously could use a nightly build and throw it onto the Raspbery Pi or even flash it to a Galaxy Nexus. These methods were both quite complicated, though. Good news, a new Firefox browser plug-in allows you to emulate FireFox OS on Mac, Linux and Windows.

SaaS

If you’ve followed the short history of the OpenStack cloud computing platform, you probably know that NASA and Rackspace drove the early development of the project. Today, Nebula, headed by former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, is naming Jesse Andrews as VP of product management. Andrews was the founder of ANSO Labs and founding engineer of OpenStack. ANSO Labs was the company that designed and implemented the core OpenStack cloud technologies Nova and Horizon for NASA.

CMS

Every city in the world needs to have a website. The good people at open source CMS vendor WordPress think that CMS should be free too.

So WordPress is now offering a WordPress.com/cities setup and account for any city for free. This is the hosted version of the open source WordPress code that powers more blogs than any other software on Earth.

Education

MOOCs—or Massive Open Online Courses—have been getting a lot of attention lately. Just in the last year or so there’s been immense interest in the potential for large scale online learning, with significant investments being made in companies (Coursera, Udacity, Udemy), similar non-profit initiatives (edX), and learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard). The renewed interest in MOOCs was ignited after last year’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course offered via Stanford University, when over 160,000 people signed up to take the free online course. The idea of large-scale, free online education has been around for quite some time. Some examples include David Wiley’s 2007 Introduction to Open Education; Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, led by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in 2008; Open Content Licensing for Educators; and many others.

Healthcare

Robert Wentz, CEO and president of Oroville Hospital, spoke about the hospital’s success in implementing open-source electronic health records at a summit held outside of Washington, D.C., on Oct. 17 and 18.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

GCC 4.8 features improvements to link-time optimizations (LTO) with the LTO partitioning having been re-written for improved reliability and maintainability while fixing some link failures (see our GCC 4.7 LTO benchmarks). Aside from improving LTO, there’s also improved inter-procedural optimizations. The interprocedural optimization improvements come from a new symbol table, improvements to the inline heuristicsm and better inlining decisions.

Public Services/Government

The petitions for Texas and other states to secede from the U.S. on the White House’s “We the People” site have drawn a great deal of attention in the past couple of days. I find it highly ironic that people are protesting following the re-election of the Administration by using the very platform set up by said Administration for grassroots advocacy. That being said, it’s also a testament to the idea that open government works—even for those who believe it doesn’t.

A halfhearthed implementation of OpenOffice has frustrated the civil servants working for the German city of Freiburg, says Timothy Simms, one of the city’s council members. “I think that in their anger, they’re now making OpenOffice the scapegoat for many other IT problems.”

One of the problems, according to Simms, is that the city never seriously switched to OpenOffice, a free software office suite. He says that many civil servants are still using a version of a proprietary office suite that is now over a decade old.

Openness/Sharing

Belief Genome™, described as an “open source technology startup”, aims to map all human beliefs. The prototype code is already available to the public on Github, however there’s still a lot of development to be done.

Open Hardware

Engineers from Google’s Books team have released the design plans for a comparatively reasonably priced book scanner under an open source licence on Google Code. The Verge reports that the engineers developed a prototype during the “20 per cent time” that Google allocates to its employees for personal projects. Built using a scanner, a vacuum cleaner and various other components, the Linear Book Scanner can automatically digitise entire books.

As part of my job I dedicate almost 20% of my time to projects related to the SourceForge core business, and this includes advising few open-source-related companies. Among them a special place goes to Bitergia, a company focused in the area of software development analytics.

Standards/Consortia

For governments looking for cutting edge, open source messaging solutions, the recent action by the OASIS standards consortium to approve the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) Version 1.0 is a major development.

The need for cutting edge, mission critical messaging options is arising in a variety of contexts: it is a key component to interoperable ‘smart grid’ frameworks, as well as ‘cloud’ solutions.

The Homeland Security Department spent $430 million on a fruitless plan to enable radio users departmentwide to communicate on the same frequency, according to a new audit released Tuesday by an internal watchdog.

The reason that President Barack Obama won reelection, as most everyone knows by now, is that older white males, on whom the Republican Party has long relied, are declining in numbers, while women and minority voters, key components of Obama’s base, are increasing. In the electoral post-mortems, Obama’s victory has been considered a kind of valedictory to white male supremacy. But his win did something else: Obama killed John Wayne on Nov. 6 — with the complicity of roughly 61 million Americans.

[...]

Wayne’s America was hard and unyielding. This emerging America is softer and more sensitive. As opposed to a solitary hero, it embraces the idea of collective heroism.

Health/Nutrition

“PLEASE put your hand on the scanner,” a receptionist at a doctor’s office at New York University Langone Medical Center said to me recently, pointing to a small plastic device on the counter between us. “I need to take a palm scan for your file.”

Despite Americans overwhelmingly rejecting Mitt Romney and his plans to “repeal Obamacare on day one,” an effort to nonetheless thwart the federal health care law on the state level is underway, led by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity and Cato Institute, with help from American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is a key holdout and has not indicated whether he will continue to actively block the health care law.

Security

Researchers in Norway have uncovered evidence of a vast Middle Eastern espionage network that for the past year has deployed malicious software to spy on Israeli and Palestinian targets.

The discovery, by Oslo-based antivirus and security firm Norman ASA, is the latest in a series of revelations involving digital surveillance activity of unknown origin that appears designed to gather intelligence from specific targets in the Middle East.

[...]

According to Trend, the latest iterations of Xtreme Rat have Windows 8 compatibility,

Defence/Police/Aggression

When registering, present as many forms of ID as possible. Be sure to mention where you work EVEN if no one asks. Brag if you have to. Hand out business cards to the staff. Let the desk clerk know that your stay here is no secret and that your room number should be given to anyone who asks, including those who don’t ask. When asked if you have a room preference, answer with a bright, but unfrightening, “I’ve never had a ‘preference’ in my life! I’m easy to please and an American citizen!”

Head directly to your room, carefully avoiding eye contact with doors marked “Employees Only.” Immediately unpack all of your luggage. Make several phones calls using ONLY the in-room phone. Call the front desk several times so as to avoid appearing suspicious. Return to your unattended vehicle and clone yourself using existing, but non-potentially-dangerous technology. Make no sudden movements and keep your ID and passport displayed prominently. Return one of yourselves to your hotel room, again using the front entrance in a non-threatening, flag-waving manner.

Stay in your room. Use the provided wi-fi. Avoid sites that use any form of encryption. Be careful not to stay in your room too long. When venturing out for something to eat or a non-suspicious conversation with the suspicious staff, avoid stairwells, hallways, exits/entrances, and connecting roads. On second thought, just stay in your room. This will make it easier to avoid being caught up in the middle of a personnel shift change.

If you must leave your room, smile and wave at each and every security camera. Lift your shirt to display lack of weapons, explosives or identifiable scars and tattoos. If purchasing anything from the hotel, use only credit cards, checks or DNA. Return to your room using the most surveilled route. Use the in-room phone to order room service. Turn down the delivery when it comes, stating that you’re trying to keep visitors and deliveries to a minimum. Apologize for not having any cash to tip with, but explain that this lack of cash directly contributes (not monetarily, of course) to the safety of everyone in the hotel. Repeat this apology to housekeeping when they arrive, being sure to answer the door before they get to the second knock. Try to ignore their just-out-of-earshot griping about having to clean around the scattered contents of four large suitcases. Smile in a non-threatening fashion and shrug as if to say, “LOOK AT HOW MUCH I DON’T HAVE TO HIDE.”

President Obama has signed a secret directive that effectively enables the military to act more aggressively to thwart cyber­attacks on the nation’s web of government and private computer networks.

Presidential Policy Directive 20 establishes a broad and strict set of standards to guide the operations of federal agencies in confronting threats in cyberspace, according to several U.S. officials who have seen the classified document and are not authorized to speak on the record. The president signed it in mid-October.

Finance

Mitt Romney said he wasn’t concerned about the very poor, because they have a safety net. This is typical of the widespread ignorance about inequality in our country. Struggling Americans want jobs, not handouts, and for the most part they’ve paid for their “safety net.” The real problem is at the other end of the wealth gap.

A new initiative is re-energising the Occupy movement. Called the Rolling Jubilee, it is a plan to use money from donations to buy distressed consumer debt from lenders at a marked down price, just as debt collection agencies normally would. But instead of hounding debtors for payments, it will simply cancel the debts. The hope is that the liberated debtors will themselves contribute to the fund, “rolling” the jubilee forward.

Censorship

Swedish artist Lars Vilks caused a storm of controversy when his cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad’s head on a dog’s body was published in 2007. Large-scale protests ensued around the Muslim world, and Vilks has since lived under what he describes as “house arrest” for his own safety.

Google’s latest transparency report is out and the notable bit of info is that governments continue to increase how often they’re seeking info about users. The increase there is a steady growth which is immensely worrisome. There’s also an equally troubling increase in the attempts to censor content via Google, though in that case, it was relatively flat until the first half of this year when it shot way, way up.

[...]

This one is concerning. What court ordered a takedown of a YouTube video criticizing local government officials? That seems like it should be public info.

This Monday, the Russian Government placed a Russian Wikipedia clone on a censorship blacklist. The Russian Government maintains such a kill switch for “harmful sites” – motivated with protecting children from drug use, child porn, or suicide methods. In reality, as usual, give anybody such a switch and they’ll shut off things they plain don’t like.

Recent revisions to the United Arab Emirates’ cybercrime law will not only restrict internet freedom but are in violation of citizens’ rights to freedom of expression and should be immediately repealed. These revisions come amidst a broader crackdown on human rights defenders both online and offline in the UAE. Freedom House renews its calls for authorities to cease efforts to silence opposition through extralegal harassment and intimidation.

Privacy

Lawmakers, now reminded of their own vulnerability, need to strengthen email privacy protections. Companies need to do more to help customers protect content.

[...]

The careers of two of the nation’s top military men have unraveled because the FBI started pulling threads from an inbox without any real evidence of a crime. Maybe that’s just the wakeup call the government needs to recognize the value of privacy.

Civil Rights

With hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to desperately needed federal safety-net programs looming and the future of Bush-era tax cuts to the rich up in the air, Chicago activists brought their case to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) last week.

In two days of action on Thursday and Friday, a coalition of Chicago grassroots and faith-based groups called Make Wall Street Pay Illinois demanded that Durbin use his leverage as Senate Majority Whip to protect crucial public services and programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare from the massive cuts ahead.

As the world’s eyes were turned on the U.S. election, Cuba’s regime unleashed a wave of arbitrary detentions, arresting 20-25 dissidents on November 8 and 9, as they were on their way to an organizing meeting for a campaign to end human rights abuses in Cuba. These detentions are in addition to another 520 arrests that took place in October, according to the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation, led by Elizardo Sanchez. Freedom House condemns Cuba’s crackdown and urges the regime to release these activists and heed citizen calls for greater respect for its human rights obligations under UN treaties.

The Law In These Parts, an Israeli documentary awarded this year’s Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury prize, examines how the country created a military-legal system to control the Palestinians in the lands Israel occupied in 1967. And at some point during the film, it becomes clear that it’s the judges who are on trial. The documentary, which just screened as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival, features forceful archive footage, alongside a line-up of Israeli legal experts, explaining how they made Israel’s occupation laws.

China will not allow foreign observers into restive Tibet to probe human rights abuses, an official said on Friday, dismissing mounting international pressure for an independent investigation in the troubled mountainous region.

Today the European Commission produces a proposal for clear action to help improve gender equality at senior corporate level.

I am and have long been politically in favour of quotas to promote gender equality. Part of me wishes we didn’t need affirmative action: but the fact is, without external intervention, it could take hundreds of years to achieve the kind of change we need. Europe has so many talented women who have what it takes to succeed in business: but none of them has eternal life, they can’t wait that long.

Finally—after more than a decade of advocacy—Congress has enacted better protections for the brave truth-tellers who safeguard taxpayer dollars. Today, the Senate unanimously passed the long-beleaguered Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA, S. 743, as amended by the House). The WPEA closes many loopholes and upgrades protections for federal workers who blow the whistle on waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality. This opening salvo to the lame duck shows that Congress can put aside partisan posturing and deliver more government accountability to the American public. These hard-fought reforms will substantially improve the status quo for federal whistleblowers and taxpayers.

Over the past five years, more than $150 million of taxpayer money has been dumped into a spy center in Lower Manhattan where employees of Wall Street firms and real estate behemoths sit side by side with municipal police to spy on the comings and goings of pedestrians on the streets around Wall Street. But none of the thousands of spy cameras positioned around the city that feed into this center foresaw the storm surge that put as much as 40 feet of corrosive salt water in the basements of commercial buildings in Lower Manhattan, crippling thousands of businesses along with the lives of area residents.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

Last week, we discussed Microsoft’s patent filing on a content distribution system that counted heads and charged license fees accordingly. Utilizing the Kinect or some other unnamed technology, Microsoft had the beginnings of the copyright industries’ wildest dreams: an opportunity to treat the public’s living rooms like theaters and collect “admission” from every viewer.

A German court in Frankfurt (Beschl. v. 14.05.2012 – Az.: 5/28 Qs 15/12) has ruled that a request for mutual legal assistance from the United States regarding stripping assets belonging to Kim Dotcom, has no basis for legal action in Germany.

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Staff of the EPO is given yet more reasons to protest tomorrow at the British Consulate, for the so-called 'President' of the EPO reminds everyone of the very raison d'être for the protest -- a vain disregard for the rule of law

The European Patent Office (EPO) President, Benoît Battistelli, reportedly started threatening -- as before -- staff that decides to exercise the right to assemble and protest against abuses, including the abuses of President Battistelli himself

A protest in Munich in less than 6 days will target Mr. Sean Dennehey, who has helped Battistelli cover up his abuses and crush legitimate critics, whom he deemed illegal opposition as if the EPO is an authoritarian regime as opposed to a public service which taxpayers are reluctantly (but forcibly) funding